It’s here. Today is IBM‘s announcement day for i 7.3, which becomes available Friday, April 15. The Technology Refresh, TR4 for i 7.2, arrives May 20. A new OS release is a glimpse of the future. For some of you, the future is now. You’re the early adopters–the people who put the bug in IBM’s ear several years ago about expanding analytical capabilities and help getting a handle on the security problem that is crying for attention.

This release fits into the long-term strategy of Chief Architect Steve Will by providing more options for those who want to develop

Two important things happened at the OpenPower Summit last week. One of them concerns IBM i shops directly and the other one affects them indirectly and perhaps more importantly. The first is that IBM rolled out an official roadmap for Power chip development for the next five-plus years. The second was that search engine giant Google and cloud operator Rackspace Hosting said that they were collaborating on a design of a future system based on the Power9 chip.

Google has been experimenting with Power8 chips for at a couple of years, and we suspect (without any corroborating evidence at all

Selling boxes in the midrange isn’t easy. A shrinking customer base, falling margins on hardware sales, and tight IT budgets combine to put the squeeze on even the best-run reseller outfits. For longtime IBM business partner Jim Kandrac, the shift was palpable enough to lead him to rename his Cleveland, Ohio-based company from United Computer Group to UCG Technologies.

It’s notable that “computer” is no longer in the name of Kandrac’s company. Are computers no longer important to the business? “The word computer is becoming more passé,” he says. “They’re still important, but they’re less important.”

In the heyday

Organizations are often reluctant to admit that they have inadequate system security. Quite possibly they may not even realize it. That’s not uncommon, particularly in the IBM midrange community, where we know there’s a false sense of security deeply rooted in the conviction that IBM i is inherently secure. Nothing could be further from the truth, although thinking any system is inherently secure is an equally foolish mistake. It’s all a matter of understanding how to manage security on a system.

Preconceived notions that the IBM i platform is some sort of superhero in a box is one of the

The IBM Corporation was run as a benevolent dictatorship through 1971. Thomas Watson Senior, and then Thomas Junior, ran IBM as if they owned it. They both had an entrepreneurial flair and few would deny that when they were in charge of IBM, they ran the company as if it were a sole proprietorship. They had many wonderful policies such as taking care of the people so that the people would take care of the business, and of course the classic: “Respect for the Individual.”

IBM believed in Wild Ducks and chairman Watson Junior wrote about them. He was not